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Friday, June 16, 2017

Signed in Blood

Mrs. Wentworth came to see Father Bredder with a very
disturbing story. She was terrified of being murdered – burned to death – by her
husband. She told him of the time her mattress was soaked in gasoline, and
other mysterious incidents. She’s even heard her husband’s voice telling her that
she must be burned! But how could this be possible? Mrs. Wentworth’s husband, a
dentist, has been dead for two months, having died in a traffic accident!

Father Bredder doesn’t brush off Mrs. Wentworth’s story,
though – he has a nasty feeling of having spotted Satan’s hand at work in this
situation, and he enlists the help of Lieutenant Louis Minardi of the Los
Angeles police to investigate Mrs. Wentworth’s story. When the case turns
deadly, Father Bredder must investigate who made A Pact with Satan, selling their soul to the Evil One by committing
murder…

A Pact with Satan
is the second Father Bredder mystery by Leonard Holton, penname of Leonard
Wibberley (author of The Mouse That Roared).
I first came across the author in Otto Penzler’s The Great Detectives, a book which collected
a few essays by various authors about their detectives. Holton’s essay on
Father Bredder particularly fascinated me, in which he explained why Father Bredder
is not just another Father Brown clone, and how he attempted to create
mysteries which Father Bredder would solve with “spiritual fingerprints”. (It
helped that Holton had words of high praise for Agatha Christie.)

Father Bredder’s motives for investigating crimes are
simple: he wants to save the soul of the criminal, for he or she has not just
broken the laws of men, but the law of God. Holton’s essay did spoil the first book of the series, The Saint Maker, but that still
proved to be a delightful read. Well, since originally reading and
reviewing The Saint Maker in 2013, I
was delighted to discover that Holton’s Father Bredder mysteries are available –
at a very reasonable price – in the Kindle store. So I was eager to jump into A Pact with Satan, the second book in
the series, to see if I would enjoy it.

Unfortunately, A Pact
with Satan is a relatively big disappointment as a mystery. As soon as the
mystery was outlined, I knew the solution, and was shocked only by how obvious
the answer was. I saw precisely what Holton was trying to do. In the very best
mysteries, not a single fact is concealed from the reader. How, then is the
author to spring a surprise? One effective way is to get the reader to
construct a faulty framework to interpret those facts. At the last moment, the
author changes the framework, and voila,
there is the solution, so surprising, yet so obvious in retrospect! Thus, to
make a ridiculous example, the crucial fact that the dead man would enjoy ice cream
in his study is not crucial due to the ice cream, but because the freezer in
which the ice cream had to be kept was missing. Unfortunately, the framework
Holton wants you to make is so rickety and clearly faulty that as a seasoned
mystery reader I didn’t buy into it for a moment, but instantly saw the correct
framework.

But on top of this major flaw is the fact that the motive is
both absurd and sprung out of nowhere. It was the only aspect of the mystery I
couldn’t understand, and when I read the explanation I shook my head in
disappointment. Indeed, the most fascinating mystery in A Pact with Satan was the mystery of what Lieutenant Minardi would
buy his daughter Barbara for her thirteenth birthday: he enlisted Father
Bredder’s help for gift suggestions, and their attempts to come up with
something were one of the book’s enjoyable features… but even this got a very
disappointing resolution, because it technically never got resolved! Barbara
does indeed get a present, but it doesn’t technically come from her father. So
as far as I’m concerned, this is a cold case.

Does that mean that I hated this book? No, it doesn’t.
Father Bredder and Leonard Holton built up a lot of good will with me in my previous
exposure to their stuff, and this proved to be the difference maker. I already
liked this fictional universe and the characters within, and it was nice to be
back. I particularly like what Holton tries to do in constructing a mystery where
Father Bredder’s identity as a Catholic priest gives him unique insight into
the spiritual condition of the people around him, including the criminal. It is
different from Chesterton’s Father Brown, though superficially it may sound
identical. I also love Father Bredder, a man who tries his best to be a good
priest but who has also experienced the horrors of war. However, as a
seminarian studying to become a Catholic priest one day (God willing), this
could be bias on my part – I’m not sure a non-Catholic would get the same level
of enjoyment out of Father Bredder.

Regardless, A Pact
with Satan is the wrong book to begin reading this series with. The
solution is obvious, the whole case is frustratingly transparent despite having
a few good ideas – I would have liked to see the murder method explained at the
end in a better mystery. It is fun to meet these fictional characters again,
but if you were meeting them for the first time, you might walk away asking
yourself why it took them so long to spot the obvious.

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